Venice likes Brian De Palma. The Black Dahlia is his fifth premiere at the world's oldest, and some say grandest, film festival. But considering the veteran director's last movie, Femme Fatale, went straight to video in the UK, it was a bit of a risk opening the 63rd edition with this adaptation of James Ellroy's bestseller.

The evening, however, turned out to be the kind of triumph Cannes didn't get when it opened with the lumbering The Da Vinci Code. This is De Palma back to something like his best. It's a superbly shot and at times controversial thriller which may not quite measure up to the film of Ellroy's LA Confidential but is certainly in the same class.

The book and the film are based on the true story of the brutal murder of Elizabeth "Betty" Short, a 22-year-old aspiring actress from the East Coast who came to LA like so many other pretty girls to knock on Hollywood's door. On 15 January, 1947, she was discovered brutally murdered in a vacant lot near Leimert Park.

She was naked, cut in half at the waist and her mouth was slit from ear to ear in a clownish grin. Photographs taken at the time were kept from the public and, despite false accusations and spurious confessions, the killing remained one of the most famous unsolved homicides in the history of the City of Angels.

Betty, however, was no angel. She was a girl about town who was probably a prostitute on the side and acted in pornographic movies when other parts failed to materialise.

Ellroy hoped his book about her would exorcise his own demons. His mother was strangled in 1958. It's certainly fertile territory for De Palma who creates, mostly in Europe, a swirling picture of boomtown LA in which corrupt policemen, venal property developers, ambitious film producers and hopeful starlets mixed with the immigrants trying to earn an honest living.

As one of the most cynical as well as one of the best directors working in America today, De Palma casts as tough an eye as Ellroy did on the incipient greed and depravity of the time.

His chief characters are two young policemen, both ex-boxers, who are called to investigate the murder. They are played by Aaron Eckhart and Josh Hartnett.

While Eckhart's Blanchard is so obsessed with the case that his relationship with Scarlett Johansson's Kay is threatened, Hartnett's German-born Bleichert pursues an affair with Hilary Swank's enigmatic Madeleine, the rich daughter of one of the city's most prominent families.

Bleichert discovers a pornographic tape which proves that Madeleine and Betty (Mia Kirshner) were competing friends. The trap is thus sprung, and both fall into it.

Shot in style by Vilmos Zsigmond and designed by Dante Ferretti, the film has everything it takes to allow De Palma some of those virtuoso tricks that light up the screen in his best works and prove that he knows his movies backwards.

There are reminders of Hitchcock's Vertigo in one remarkable death scene as a half-strangled man falls to his end over high banisters.

But Josh Friedman's screenplay is notable too, so that the cast have every opportunity to spread their wings. Hartnett and Swank are particularly good. But it is De Palma's film. Perhaps the drama becomes melodrama at times. He never lets go of a weird moment. But, warts and all, this is the best American thriller for some time.

Delude la Dalia di De Palma
di Adriano Ercolani
Un noir sostanzialmente elegante nella forma e piuttosto ben calibrato nel racconto, ma senza una vera identità endemica, quindi senza un’anima, apre la 63^ Mostra del Cinema di Venezia
Los Angeles, 1947. La giovane attricetta Elizabeth “Betty” Short (Mia Kirshner) viene trovata orribilmente mutilata e sfregiata. Di risolvere l’efferato caso di omicidio sono incaricati due detective che al momento sono l’emblema del distretto di polizia della città: i due ex-pugili Bucky Bleichert (Josh Hartnett) e Lee Blanchard (Aaron Eckhart) vengono però sovrastati dall’indagine, ed iniziano a covare una vera e propria ossessione per la vittima, soprannominata “la Dalia Nera”. Questo ambiguo sentimento porterà i due a mettere a repentaglio la propria vita ed anche le relazioni a loro più care, soprattutto quella con Kay Lake (Scarlett Johansson), fidanzata di Blachard. L’altra “dark lady” destinata ad entrare nella vita di Bleichert è Madeleine Linscott (Hilary Swank), ricca e disturbata ragazza che somiglia in maniera impressionante alla Dalia Nera e che conosce segreti fondamentali alla soluzione del caso…

Alla fine, le nostre mal celate preoccupazioni sulla trasposizione del complicato romanzo di James Ellroy si sono dimostrate del tutto fondate: “The Black Dahlia” si presenta come un film tutto sommato deludente proprio perché non riesce a restituire il senso primo dell’opera letteraria, che era appunto ossessione per una vittima ritenuta indifesa, ed attraverso questa ricerca isterica di redenzione da parte dei due poliziotti protagonisti: soprattutto la figura di Blanchard in questo senso viene totalmente spogliata della sua potenza intrinseca, e diventa in più occasioni monodimensionale quando non addirittura macchiettistica. Anche le modifiche della sceneggiatura rispetto al testo originale intervengono a semplificare la trama togliendo però momenti e pagine in cui la psicologia dei personaggi e la loro “dannazione” interiore li rendeva assolutamente affascinanti. Al cinema assistiamo ad un noir che è sostanzialmente elegante nella forma e piuttosto ben calibrato nel racconto, ma senza una vera identità endemica, quindi senza un’anima.

A parte qualche solito virtuosismo con la machina da presa Brian De Palma gira con un’eleganza ed una misura che ben si addicono prima al genere e poi alla ricostruzione d’epoca (come la solito bravissimo il nostro Dante Ferretti alle scenografie). Di certo il dover dirigere un cast di star tutte completamente fuori ruolo non ha giovato né al regista né tantomeno al lungometraggio stesso. La Swank ed Hartnett se la cavano con mestiere, Eckhart e soprattutto la Johansson franano nella smorfiosità, ed alla fine la migliore sulla scena è un’intensa e dolorosa Mia Kirshner.

“The Black Dahlia” non è certo un film insulso da guardare, ma è la precisa dimostrazione di come un adattamento non dovrebbe essere: il bellissimo “L.A. Confidential” (id., 1997) di Curtis Hanson - scritto insieme a Brian Helgeland - aveva stravolto la storia di Ellroy, ma ne aveva invece mantenuto il senso profondo e lo spessore intrinseco dei personaggi. In quest’opera accade quasi esattamente il contrario, e ciò a scapito di un contenuto che deve per forza di cose arrendesi alla forma. Come troppo spesso ormai accade nel cinema di De Palma.

The Black Dahlia
By TODD MCCARTHY

A literally ripping good yarn is undercut by some lackluster performances and late-inning overripe melodrama in "The Black Dahlia." Based on James Ellroy's estimable fictional account of what was, for 47 years, Los Angeles' most notorious unsolved murder, this lushly rendered noir finds director Brian De Palma in fine visual fettle as he pulls off at least three characteristically eye-popping set pieces while trying, with mixed success, to keep some pretty cockeyed plotlines under control. Given the difficulty even the significantly superior Ellroy adaptation "L.A. Confidential" had in attracting a sizable audience, anything more than a moderate B.O. turnout looks doubtful.

Like the novel, script by Josh Friedman ("War of the Worlds") uses the horrific 1947 killing of 22-year-old would-be actress Elizabeth "Betty" Short as a way to delve into the specifically Southern California brand of crime, sleaze, corruption, hypocrisy, cover-up, disillusionment and dream-crushing that has been a staple of resonant pulp fiction for decades.

In this respect, "The Black Dahlia" covers familiar ground, both thematically and in its seductively tawdry atmosphere highlighted by the usual downtown-area locations, deco apartments, constant cigarette smoke, beautiful cars, men in natty suits and hats and women in gorgeous glamour gowns, with the gap between the rich and powerful and those they would keep down never far from the center of things. Add the evocatively bluesy-jazz score and you might almost hear yourself muttering, "Chinatown."

But "Chinatown" it ain't, not in any department. On its own level, however, new pic generates a reasonable degree of intrigue, initially in the ambiguous relationship among tough L.A. homicide detectives Leland "Lee" Blanchard (Aaron Eckhart), younger partner Dwight "Bucky" Bleichert (Josh Hartnett) -- former boxers nicknamed "Fire" and "Ice"-- and their voluptuous blond platonic ladyfriend Kay Lake (Scarlett Johansson). What gives with this threesome isn't revealed until later, but Eckhart in particular takes the opportunity of the opening half-hour set-up to carve a strong impression as a volatile, aggressive cop ready for just about anything on a police force that craves his kind of guy.

In the first big set piece, the camera arches high and low and around and about in covering Lee and Bucky's stakeout of and shootout with some lowlifes in a lousy neighborhood. As their real target slips away, the mutilated body of a young woman is discovered in a field across the street; she's been cut in half, disemboweled and drained of blood, her head bludgeoned and her mouth extended by three-inch cuts on each side into a sick grin, details the police are intent on withholding from the public.

Hotshots Fire and Ice take on the case, but their few interviews with those who knew Betty Short yield little other than her grandiose dreams of movie stardom and her good-times attitude toward men, especially those in uniform.

Bucky becomes fixated on a long screen test he discovers in which Betty (Mia Kirshner) was prodded and interrogated by a director (voiced by De Palma himself).

Strangely, the combination of Betty's killing and the imminent release of a criminal he long ago put away makes the more experienced Lee flip out; with this, the most watchable and compelling character in the picture thus far frequently disappears from view for murky reasons, forcing the lower-voltage Bucky and Kay to the fore.

This changes for the better when Bucky's investigation into a lesbian angle in Betty's life leads him to high-society dark lady Madeleine Linscott (Hilary Swank), who turns up during a wonderful for-gals-only supper club production number of "Love for Sale" crooned by none other than k.d. lang. The suggestive sparring between the working-class cop and the classy woman with a pronounced physical resemblance to the murder victim may not be of the highest order, but it's enough to get them where they need to go, between the sheets and into a hot romance involving untold layers of deception.

Madeleine proves the lowly Bucky's passport to the rarefied realm of the city's drippingly wealthy, starting with her family: There's naughty younger sister Martha (Rachel Miner), batty mother (Fiona Shaw) and strange Scottish father (John Kavanagh). A dinner scene with this quintet is so bizarre you can only laugh, with Shaw's perf so over the top, albeit intentionally, that it amounts to a curious spectacle unto itself.

The convergence in a marbled lobby with massive surrounding stairs of Bucky, the unhinged Lee and his now ex-con adversary provides the elements for De Palma's most virtuoso scene, one in which shocking and upsetting violence forever alters the trajectories of several lives and the picture.

Hereafter, revelations about who was up to what become essential, leading to a big and near-ludicrous explanatory scene in which far too much information needs to be swallowed in one gulp to be remotely digestible. Once the table has been cleared, it's hard to buy what's proposed here as a satisfactory resolution to an persistently baffling case.

Eckhart's very good and so is Swank as a temptress with many games to play. But Hartnett is too blank and expressionless to carry the picture; he narrates and is almost constantly on view, but offers little nuance or depth. His Bucky is the eternal hard-bitten cop who learns life's bitter lessons on the job. It's not the actor's fault that so many great macho stars have made their names playing such parts, but it's impossible to watch "The Black Dahlia" and not idly think of how indelibly Bogart, Mitchum, Sterling Hayden, Jack Nicholson, Russell Crowe and numerous others have handled such roles.

Although she looks properly in period, Johansson also is weak, evoking little of the requisite vulnerability in a damaged woman who keeps the reasons for her hurt, and her real emotional impulses, deeply submerged.

Seen mostly in the vintage black-and-white screen test and brief flashbacks, Kirshner nicely catches the unformed dreaminess of a young fabulist who became famous only in death, while supporting cast of lesser-known thesps playing cops and baddies registers well.

It's great to see cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond working at full command on a big picture again after several years on more marginal projects. His scope framing and constant camera moves possess a bracing confidence.

Much of the film was shot in Bulgaria, but you'd never know it, as Dante Ferretti's unerring production design and Jenny Beavan's costumes combine with sufficient Los Angeles exterior work to provide authentic atmosphere.

Mark Isham's moody, old-fashioned score is one of his best, pumping up the dread and suspense and often providing emotional substance where the actors can't manage it.

I'm not sure if the movie could actually have a second half that did not come off as cheesy. The book was very good, but the ending was out there and very strange with a [spoil]Chinatown: daughter/father relationship[/spoil] and the book featured many love triangles which could be hard to translate to the screen.

The Black Dahlia
James Christopher at the Venice Film Festival

IF YOU have to open your film festival with a corpse, you might as well make it a ripe one. Frankly they don’t come more mangled than Elizabeth “Betty” Short.

On January 15, 1947, the 22-year-old B-movie actress — nicknamed the Black Dahlia because of the flowers she used to wear in her hair — was discovered in pieces in a vacant parking lot in downtown Los Angeles. Her assailant had cut her naked body in half at the waist, removed the organs, drained the blood, sodomised her, and slit her mouth from ear to ear. Not necessarily in that order. Needless to say, the newspapers couldn’t get enough of this eye-popping murder, or the lifestyle of the damaged “heroine” who seemed to have walked off the pulpy edge of a Raymond Chandler novel.

James Ellroy immortalised the ghastly killing 40 years later in a bestselling whodunit set against the boom-or-bust era of postwar LA. (Apparently, the writer hoped that it would exorcise the demons of his own mother’s strangulation in 1958. God knows what he was thinking.) Brian De Palma has adapted Ellroy’s book into a fiendishly complicated period piece about an investigation that poisons everyone it touches. Aaron Eckhart and Josh Hartnett are a pair of prize-fighting boxers — Mr Fire and Mr Ice — and young poster boy detectives in the LAPD. They are charged with solving the crime. Eckhart likes to use his fists and talk like James Cagney. Hartnett is the cynical narrator who loses what’s left of his innocence watching footage of Betty Short’s casting couch auditions. Everyone is either losing or taking.

Scarlett Johansson is almost ludicrously glamorous as Eckhart’s girlfriend, and a sizzling Monroe tease who has both men wrapped around her ankles. And Hilary Swank is terrific as the privileged prime suspect and femme fatale who is morbidly drawn to the crime scene like a moth to a candle. You could boil eggs on the hot candour of the script. Venice has an insatiable appetite for film noir, and the relentless blizzard of stylish references will make cinema buffs squeal. This is De Palma’s fifth premiere at the festival and it’s full of body doubles and women dressed to kill.

But there’s something monstrously corny about the conventional love triangle at the heart of the film between Eckhart, Johansson, and Hartnett. And something very Addams Family about the victims and the extras. That includes the great and good of Hollywood itself. Key characters get lumbered with mad obsessions underscored by impenetrable dialogue. There are half a dozen crucial exchanges that might as well be spoken in Greek. And several characters are simply left drifting, notably Johansson, after making such sharp and promising entrances.

Still, in the great scheme of films where style inevitably trounces content, this is not a criminal embarrassment. Lopsided, sure. But De Palma’s picture is as artistically fearless as it is sometimes gory.